Hŏ Ka-i

Korean spelling
Chosŏn'gŭl	허가이
Hancha	許 哥 而 (許 哥 誼)
Revised Romanization	Heo Ga-i
McCune- Reischauer	Hŏ Kai
See also : Korean name

Cyrillic ( Russian )
	Алексей Иванович Хегай
Transl. :	Aleksej Ivanovič Chegaj
Transcr. :	Alexei Ivanovich Chegai

Hŏ Ka-i (actually Alexei Ivanovich Chegai ; born March 18, 1908 in Khabarovsk , † July 2, 1953 in Pyongyang ) was a Soviet - North Korean politician.

Childhood and youth

Hŏ was born under the name Alexei Chegai as the son of a teacher in Khabarovsk in the Far East of Russia . His family belonged to the Korean minority, the so-called Korjo-Saram . After his mother's death in 1911, his father took his own life. Chegai and his brother grew up with their grandfather. The family's difficult economic situation forced the young Hŏ to go to work at an early age.

Activity in the Soviet Union

The pro-communist mood among Koreans, who hoped that the Bolsheviks would improve their legal and social situation, also politicized Hŏ. In 1924 he became a member of the Komsomol , the communist youth organization, and in 1930 of the Communist Party . His political talent was soon discovered and he made a career in the Komsomol apparatus in the Far East. In 1933 he moved to the Moscow area, where he held various posts in the youth organization. In 1934 he began studying at the Sverdlov Agricultural University in Moscow , which he broke off in 1935 because he had been married since 1927 and had to support his family. So he returned to the Far East, where he again held various offices in the Komsomol and soon also in the party. He was deployed in the Posjet district . This area on the border with Korea was mostly inhabited by ethnic Koreans and the center of Korean culture in the Soviet Union. During his tenure as the second district secretary, Chegai made connections with many Koreans abroad who would later belong to the political elite of North Korea . In the autumn of 1937, during the “Great Purges” in the Soviet Union, Hŏ was expelled from the party. Like many other Koreans in the Soviet Union, he was forcibly relocated with his family to Soviet Central Asia and from then on worked as an accountant in Yangiyo'l near Tashkent (see Korjo-Saram for the history of the Korean minority). In 1939 he was rehabilitated and his party membership restored. Chegai then worked in the party apparatus of his new place of residence and later in other areas of Uzbekistan .

Activity in North Korea

In autumn 1945, after Japan surrendered , the Soviet Union began looking for suitable ethnic Koreans who could work in the Soviet-occupied part of Korea to build a state in the spirit of the Soviets. Hŏ also went to Korea with a group of other Koreans, where he was initially supposed to work as a translator for the Red Army . In 1946, a massive, organized transition of Soviet Koreans from the military administrative apparatus of the Red Army to the Korean civil administration began, where on the one hand they were to advise the local Koreans on building a system with Soviet characteristics and on the other hand to secure the influence of the Soviet Union on the newly emerging regime. By the end of 1945, Chegai was instrumental in building the North Korean Communist Party . In December 1945 he was elected deputy chairman of the previous committee of the later Central Committee of the CP of North Korea. During this time he Koreanized his Russian name Chegai , which is a Russification of the Korean surname Hŏ , and is now called Hŏ Ka-i .

After the union of the CP of North Korea with the New People's Party in August 1946, he became a member of the Politburo of the newly formed North Korean Labor Party and head of the organization department at its Central Committee. Here he was mainly busy building up the party organization. In September 1948 he rises to become the first deputy chairman of the party. He thus actually took third place in the state and party hierarchy after Kim Il-sung and Kim Du-bong . With the formal merger of the Labor Party of North Korea with the Party of Labor South Korea in 1949 to form the Labor Party of Korea (PdAK), Hd's career reached its climax. Kim Il-sung replaced Kim Du-bong as party chairman. Hŏ became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the newly formed party and thus came directly after Kim Il-sung in the party hierarchy. When North Korea started the Korean War with its attack on South Korea in 1950 , Hŏ was one of the few functionaries who knew about the planned attack in advance. At the Third Central Committee Plenum in December 1950, during the war, it was decided that all party members who had been on territory occupied by opposing troops at any time during the fighting should be checked. This review was carried out under H's strict direction. Members who z. B. who lost their party membership in the chaos of war were usually expelled from the party and had little prospect of rehabilitation anytime soon.

In November 1951, at the fourth plenum of the PdAK Central Committee, this approach was sharply criticized and H und was removed from the post of First Secretary at Kim Il-sung's instigation. The background to these events was Kim's endeavor to eliminate the Chinese, so-called Yan'an faction, as well as the Soviet faction within the party and to consolidate his sole rule by strengthening his faction of the former partisans. Hŏ was appointed deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers and dealt mainly with agricultural policy and was responsible for the reconstruction of the Sunan reservoir, the dam of which was badly damaged in the war. In the summer of 1953, Hŏ was accused of being responsible for delays in rebuilding the weir. A Politburo meeting was to be held in early July to bring these fabricated allegations forward. According to Kim Il-sung's ideas, Hŏ should again be demoted and made trade minister by the deputy head of government.

Hŏ died of suicide on July 2, 1953, according to official sources. However, it is unclear whether Hŏ actually ended his life himself or whether he was murdered, possibly by followers of Kim.

literature

• Lan'kov, Andrej N .: KNDR včera i segodnja. Neformal'naja istorija Severnoj Korei. Moskva: Vostok-Zapad 2005. ISBN 5-478-00060-4 .
• Lan'kov, Andrej N .: Avgust, 1956 god. Krizis v Severnoj Koree. Moskva: Rosspėn, 2009. ISBN 978-5-8243-0907-2 .

Web links

• Biographies of Soviet Korean Leaders ( Library of Congress )

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Hŏ is the family name here, Ka-i is the first name.